Reading is easiest, you have all the time in the world to process and the language is already properly formatted.
Writing is harder. You still have time to think, but now you have to do the formatting.
Listening is harder yet, you have to process quickly or you’ll get lost - but at least it’s *usually* proper.
Speaking is the hardest, you have to process quickly and do all the formatting and grammar yourself. It requires considerable command of the language to replicate it in real time.
Plenty of people can learn languages and can speak and understand what is spoken to them rather quickly but not read or write properly.
So yeah not really, it really depends how you learn a language.
I was about to say. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school and 4 semesters in college. Because of that I can still pick out enough words and tenses when looking at something that, along with context clues I get an okay idea of what’s being written. But I can’t speak a lick of Spanish
It really depends on the the context and means in which you picked it up, I can speak German and Spanish far better than I can read or write in them, I have relatively good conversational Hebrew and Arabic but I barely know the Hebrew alphabet enough to read and don't get my started on Arabic. Same thing about Thai I've spent quite a bit of time there and picked enough to be able to understand the gist of what is going on and converse with people on a very basic level but I don't know a single letter of the Thai alphabet.
Lastly my mother used to teach Russian lit and I actually had to read the classics in Russian, I can still relatively fluently speak it and understand everything being said unless it's local slang but my reading now is probably at the level of a 4 year old at this point since I haven't touched Cyrillic since I was a teenager.
However if you learn languages in an educational setting pretty much every XSL program emphasizes on reading and writing and grammar more than speaking, most tests are also written rather than verbal so most of your practice was in reading and writing which is what you fall back on.
I feel like those might be people growing up in a household that speaks their heritage language but is not formally schooled in it like a young person in an immigrant family.
When listening, you can get away with not understanding everything, and use context clues to fill in the blanks.
When speaking, you can't just throw out a nonsense word when you don't know the right one. You have to construct your message from scratch and don't have anything else helping you figure out what's correct.
Also, I have a feeling that remembering the meaning of a particular word given to you is easier than remembering the word for a meaning with nothing given to you.
The way I understand it is that it’s like music. You can hear and understand music, the notes, the melody, the instruments, whatever. But it doesn’t mean you can create a song - that’s much harder.
You have to have the vocabulary, the sentence structure, and the pronunciation (sometimes sounds that you never learned how to make!) to create a sentence in a language.
Speaking requires far more practice, like with any skill it takes time to adapt to it.
In general we are quite good at pattern recognition, and when listening to speakers you can get a lot of what is going on not by just hearing the words but also getting additional information from the context, tone and other things. Even if you don't understand every word you can usually fill up the gaps and pick up the gist of it which helps you to overall feel like you understand what is going on.
Take for example at "understanding" a closely related language e.g. Poles, Ukrainians and Russians would probably be able to pick up enough information from a conversation just by being from the same language family. Even between languages that are more distant the prevalence of borrowed words and universal slang also helps to fill up enough gaps.
Speaking is harder, you need to be able to formulae a coherent monologue and vocalize it, there are both mental components of not wanting to sound like an idiot and actual physical components as well the way different languages vocalize and phonetic sounds can be drastically different e.g. a throat R vs a rolling tongue R. This can make speaking relatively simple words much more difficult if the physical way another language vocalizes them is quite different to what you more commonly speak.
Reading is easiest, you have all the time in the world to process and the language is already properly formatted. Writing is harder. You still have time to think, but now you have to do the formatting. Listening is harder yet, you have to process quickly or you’ll get lost - but at least it’s *usually* proper. Speaking is the hardest, you have to process quickly and do all the formatting and grammar yourself. It requires considerable command of the language to replicate it in real time.
Plenty of people can learn languages and can speak and understand what is spoken to them rather quickly but not read or write properly. So yeah not really, it really depends how you learn a language.
I was about to say. I took 3 years of Spanish in high school and 4 semesters in college. Because of that I can still pick out enough words and tenses when looking at something that, along with context clues I get an okay idea of what’s being written. But I can’t speak a lick of Spanish
It really depends on the the context and means in which you picked it up, I can speak German and Spanish far better than I can read or write in them, I have relatively good conversational Hebrew and Arabic but I barely know the Hebrew alphabet enough to read and don't get my started on Arabic. Same thing about Thai I've spent quite a bit of time there and picked enough to be able to understand the gist of what is going on and converse with people on a very basic level but I don't know a single letter of the Thai alphabet. Lastly my mother used to teach Russian lit and I actually had to read the classics in Russian, I can still relatively fluently speak it and understand everything being said unless it's local slang but my reading now is probably at the level of a 4 year old at this point since I haven't touched Cyrillic since I was a teenager. However if you learn languages in an educational setting pretty much every XSL program emphasizes on reading and writing and grammar more than speaking, most tests are also written rather than verbal so most of your practice was in reading and writing which is what you fall back on.
I feel like those might be people growing up in a household that speaks their heritage language but is not formally schooled in it like a young person in an immigrant family.
When listening, you can get away with not understanding everything, and use context clues to fill in the blanks. When speaking, you can't just throw out a nonsense word when you don't know the right one. You have to construct your message from scratch and don't have anything else helping you figure out what's correct. Also, I have a feeling that remembering the meaning of a particular word given to you is easier than remembering the word for a meaning with nothing given to you.
I’m the opposite. I can speak enough Spanish to generally be able to communicate what I want to say, but I don’t understand anything people say to me.
Same with French. They talk so super fast even when they know a foreigner stands in front of them.
The way I understand it is that it’s like music. You can hear and understand music, the notes, the melody, the instruments, whatever. But it doesn’t mean you can create a song - that’s much harder. You have to have the vocabulary, the sentence structure, and the pronunciation (sometimes sounds that you never learned how to make!) to create a sentence in a language.
Speaking requires far more practice, like with any skill it takes time to adapt to it. In general we are quite good at pattern recognition, and when listening to speakers you can get a lot of what is going on not by just hearing the words but also getting additional information from the context, tone and other things. Even if you don't understand every word you can usually fill up the gaps and pick up the gist of it which helps you to overall feel like you understand what is going on. Take for example at "understanding" a closely related language e.g. Poles, Ukrainians and Russians would probably be able to pick up enough information from a conversation just by being from the same language family. Even between languages that are more distant the prevalence of borrowed words and universal slang also helps to fill up enough gaps. Speaking is harder, you need to be able to formulae a coherent monologue and vocalize it, there are both mental components of not wanting to sound like an idiot and actual physical components as well the way different languages vocalize and phonetic sounds can be drastically different e.g. a throat R vs a rolling tongue R. This can make speaking relatively simple words much more difficult if the physical way another language vocalizes them is quite different to what you more commonly speak.